Tombler's Home Bakery reopens 19 months after devastating fire

Ovens are filled with pasties at rebuilt Tombler's Home Bakery

Karen Drake can crimp four Cornish pasties a minute, with her eyes closed. She deftly applies her finishing touch to this best-loved product at Tombler's Home Bakery in Glendon.

She finishes dozens of these ready-in-minutes, meat-and-veggie-filled turnover pies, and finalizes plans for the cookies, heart-shaped cake and shortbread she'll offer as samples during the bakery's reopening celebration today through Saturday Feb. 13-16, and Feb. 19 and 20.

It's hard to imagine the shock that Drake and her husband Edwin (Skip) Drake faced 19 months ago. That's when an early-morning fire ravaged the beloved bakery, which stands on a hillside within sight of I-78's last exit in Pennsylvania. When the flames subsided, all that was left was a skeleton of blackened beams and a brick fireplace.

"I was just numb. I couldn't even cry. I didn't know what we were going to do," Tombler says as she recalls the wreckage.

"The linings and insulation burned out of the ovens and the glass melted out of the doors, leaving their metal shells. All that was left of our refrigerators and freezers were oddly shaped piles of melted plastic and bits of thin metal.

"Ten 30-pound boxes of blueberries, needed to complete Burnside Plantation's Blueberry Festival order for 800 pies, were squooshed down into a big, half-burned blob. Two hundred blackened pasties spilled out of another half-melted cooler."

As days passed, she realized additional losses, like her favorite baking pans; a photo of her son helping his dad and grandfather tear down an old "wash house" to make room for the original bakery, a cutter fabricated for cutting pasty shapes from the dough; and some of her mother's original recipes. She adds, however, "The pastie recipe was never lost. That's forever in my head."

The community was in shock, too, because so many people know the taste of Tombler's from-scratch baked goods including pies, many made with locally grown fruits.

You, too, may have tasted their baking at the Blueberry Festival or Celtic Fest or if you frequent the Easton or Saucon Valley farmers markets where Tombler's pasties are hot commodities.

Did you have a slice of the giant cake celebrating the 160th birthday of the Easton Farmers Market? Drake baked it.

Have you tasted garlic pasties, garlic focaccia or garlic kiffles at the Easton Garlic Festival? They were Drake creations, as well as bacon-and-egg pasties for Easton's first Bacon Festival.

Have you indulged in the lusciousness of Easton's annual Chocolate Lovers' Soire? The Drakes have been serving chocolate treats since it began seven years ago.

The day after the fire, a sign placed at Tombler's vacant space explained their absence from the Easton market. Within hours, vendors and customers began sending contributions. Two hundred guests attended a Tombler's fundraiser staged at Black & Blue.

"We also got e-mails and calls that made me cry. People were so kind and cared so much," Drake says. "We even sent out an e-mail requesting help for moving two industrial ovens that had arrived before the new bakery was ready and got all the help we needed."

They've just moved into the new bakery after months of renting temporary baking space for three days a week at Easton's Temple Covenant of Peace. "We kept our name out there by continuing to bake for the farmers markets and also had a little sales shop here at the bakery's Industrial Drive location."

Drake will serve free coffee, cookies, shortbread and mini-pasties (4 ounces) during the grand opening days. She says, "We want people to find their way to the bakery, taste what we make and enjoy it. It's really not that much, considering the support we have received."

Although the bakery's address, 1350 Industrial Drive, sounds as if it should be in the midst of large factory buildings and warehouses, it's four miles from the heart of Easton, 1.5 miles from the intersection of Freemansburg Avenue and 25th Street and one mile from I-78's last exit in Pennsylvania.

The new bakery, measuring 32 by 24 feet, is slightly different than the building it replaces. "Our sales area is up front, right where people walk in, rather than around the back of the building," Drake says. "Visitors can look beyond the sales counter and pasty display cooler, see us and talk to us while we work, thanks to its open design."

It's vastly different than the early days of the family business when Drake helped her mother, Margaret Tombler, bake fruit turnovers in their home kitchen in the early 1980s. Those turnovers were sold as fundraisers for Save Our Lehigh Valley Environment, a group fighting the expansion of the Chrin Bros. Sanitary Landfill in Williams Township.